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While Agatha Christie ranks as one of the best-selling novelists of all time and her main characters, Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, are household names, the classic charms of her whodunits remain a mystery to many younger readers.
Now HarperCollins UK, which owns the rights to all 83 Christie novels, is attempting to introduce the author - who died in 1976 - to a more youthful audience through a series of graphic novels (comics) originally produced for the French market by Parisian publishing house EP Editions.
"We originally had no ambition to publish them," says David Brawn, who as HarperCollins publishing director of estates is responsible for the canons of authors who include J.R.R. Tolkien and Christie. "But we did some research last year about who was reading Christie and found there weren't as many young people as six years ago."
Brawn hopes that the graphic novels - plus the online computer game Death on the Nile, which has been downloaded by 10 million people - will prove Christie's stories do not appeal only to older generations.
"I'm 42 and like a lot of people my age I read Agatha Christie as a teenager," he says. "I've got teenagers and the kids aren't reading Christie anymore. It's not that the books are any less satisfying or relevant - they were all historical books when I read them. But now there's really imaginative publishing targeted at young teens, like Harry Potter, Young James Bond and Alex Rider, so why would they want to read Christie?"
Eight titles - all featuring Hercule Poirot and including two of Christie's most famous works, Death on the Nile and Murder on the Orient Express, plus lesser-known titles such as her 1923 third novel Murder on the Links - will be published this year. Six more will follow next year - including the first Miss Marple adaptation, Murder in the Vicarage.
Just as Christie's tales lend themselves very easily to the big or small screen, they translate well into comic books with each mystery pared down to a compact 48 pages.
"One of the reasons they [compact] so well is because of the way she uses dialogue to tell the story," says Brawn. "Christie is criticised sometimes for not giving great characterisations. She uses a lot of stereotypes and doesn't explain a lot. All you see of the characters comes from what they do and what they say. She deliberately doesn't tell you what they're thinking because half of them are lying anyway."
Translating the stories back into English proved problematic, the French having slightly altered the endings of some titles.
"We tried to get a little bit of authenticity back into the books," Brown says. "We took the actual dialogue from the novels and put it back in. Some of the idioms peculiar to characters such as Poirot had disappeared."
Brawn also plans to commission British artists to illustrate future adaptations of Christie's sizeable back catalogue as well as other HarperCollins late authors, including Alistair McLean and C.S. Lewis. More recent historical sagas such as Bernard Cornwell's Sharpe and George McDonald Fraser's Flashman may also get the treatment.
"They're fantastic books that will adapt very well," Brawn says.
HarperCollins' revised edition of David Wenzel's 1990 comic adaptation of Tolkien's The Hobbit is already a bestseller and the company has also published graphic novel spin-offs of horror films such as 28 Weeks Later through its Fox Atomic imprint.
Brawn also hopes to follow other publishers, including Random House, which regularly publishes more cutting-edge contemporary graphic novels, including Bryan Talbot's Alice in Sunderland and Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds.
"There's a tendency for young boys in particular not to read a lot," Brawn says.
"They get sidetracked by computer games, and if they do get into comics their parents aren't all that supportive.
"Graphic novels can help introduce kids to the concept that Agatha Christie tells really good, imaginative, thought provoking stories.
"They're enjoyable in their own right but they're also a nice stepping stone to reading the books."
- Detours, HoS
